Category Archives: 508/Accessibility

Text-to-Speech in Captivate 8

508/Accessibility, Captivate, Development Tools

CP8 and TTSCaptivate continues to provide one of the more robust text-to-speech (TTS) features among the various authoring products. It not only ships with multiple voices but can access the TTS options on your Windows computer as well (I’m not sure about Mac system access though).

But it’s not necessarily an easy process to setup, so in concert with eLearning Brothers, I submitted a post “Captivate 8: Working with Text-to-Speech and Voices” a couple weeks ago – though I’m just getting around to mentioning it now 🙂 Continue reading Text-to-Speech in Captivate 8 →

Lectora 12 update

508/Accessibility, Development Tools, eLearning News, Lectora

Lectora 12 was released in December, 2014…and in a reflection of their commitment to the product, Trivantis has quickly released a patch to address some issues found with that most recent version (which ties nicely to one of our 2015 predictions that Trivantis will re-assert their product. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Adobe respond that quickly…)

See the release notes here for the Lectora 12.0.1 patch. If you are a current Lectora 12 user, you may have noticed the patch availability through the auto-update feature within the product. If not,  you can download the patch directly.

If you’re fairly new to Lectora, or want to get a general insight to the capabilities, visit their demo page for variety of ‘How-To’ and other sample courses.

Lectora is an often-underrated product with a strong history. Lectora 12 seems to have two primary goals: Continue reading Lectora 12 update →

eLearning Chef’s Top 5 Open-Source LMSystems

508/Accessibility, Learning Mgmt Systems, SCORM/xAPI

Per the previous post, here’s our list of the top 5 open-source LMS products. Yes, there are lots more. You can search for ‘top open source LMS’ and find several similar lists. We base ours on our direct experience, various readings and discussions, and general research.

These are not necessarily listed from top to bottom but generally, yes, the preferred are toward the top (as the write-ups will explain). Continue reading eLearning Chef’s Top 5 Open-Source LMSystems →

ADA/508/504 and Video Accessibility

508/Accessibility, Academics, Multimedia

A little old, but still highly relevant, from the November 2013 Streaming Media West conference came a session titled “Best Practices for Implementing Accessible Video Captioning” . Representatives from Dell, T-Mobile, and Google/YouTube discussed video captioning, mobile video, and video translation.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA, 1990) covers federal, state, and local jurisdictions, and applies to a wide range of domains, including employment, public entities, telecommunications, and places of public accommodation.

Continue reading ADA/508/504 and Video Accessibility →